Celebrating the harvest with Bulmers

Everyone knows that cider is made using apples, but people rarely give a second thought to how those apples got from a tree into their glass.

Bulmers wanted its fans to understand the provenance of their cider, as well as see the amount of effort and care that goes into every bottle. So they challenged us to find a creative way to teach the public about Bulmers’ key ingredient: fresh apples.

Autumn is prime apple harvest season, so we decided it would be the ideal time to get our wellies on and show Bulmers fans how cider starts off its life cycle using our social creation - the Harvestimator!

We set out to show how different things could affect the apple harvest at Broome Farm, one of Bulmers’ orchards. Of course there were the usual things that would affect the apples falling from trees, such as wind (via a wind machine) and rain (well – a water cannon to be precise).

Fans could guess how many apples each challenge would yield using the Harvestimator app on the Bulmers Facebook page. At the beginning of the week, we posted a teaser video outlining that week’s challenge, that included a call to action to get involved, submit a guess and win cool Bulmers products and merchandise.

Bulmers fans really took to the Harvestimator campaign. Over four weeks, 15,000 fans entered the competition and Bulmers gained 35,000 new fans on Facebook. And, in case you’re wondering what yields the most apples out of wind, rain, tug-o-war and a strongman… it’s rain. Which is lucky, seeing as we’re never short of that during harvest time.